VMware Workstation 8.0 Released

Lately I’ve gotten in the habit of tweeting things and neglecting to blog on them. VMware Workstation 8.0 was just released so I thought it would be worthy of a quick blog post.

Now you can do a lot with the free VMware Player — including running ESX4i or ESX5i — but there are several limitations (only one VM running at a time for starters).

I’ve used early versions of VMware Workstation and looking at how far it’s come is impressive. For example, now you can use VMWare Workstation as a server and host VM’s that others can remotely connect to using Workstation. And if you have some ESX hosts you can connect to them as well, and work with VMs from different workstation and ESX hosts in the same GUI.

The interface has also been redesigned — here’s a screenshot of Ubuntu (Linux), ESXi 5 and Windows 8 (Developer Preview) all running at the same time with live thumbnails:

(click to enlarge)

I should also note that previous versions of VMware Workstation (and Player) will NOT run the Windows 8 preview — VMWare Workstation 8 is required for this.

Here’s a short list of some of the new capabilities of VMware Workstation 8.0:

VMs up to 64GB RAM

HD Audio, Bluetooth and USB 3.0 support in guests

Enable CPU hardware virtualization (i.e. Intel-VT) to guests

ESXi hosts running under Workstation can now support 64-bit guests

Have VM’s autostart with the host

Allow VM’s to be shared and accessed remotely by other user of Worksation 8.0

Remotely connect to other Workstation instance and/or ESX hosts to work with even more VMs

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